2015

Earlier this month, Amazon unveiled new Fire tablets. The new models aren't really much different from the previous generation - just a bit thinner and lighter for the most part. Now Amazon is clearing its inventory, and you can get the previous-gen Fire tablet with special offers for just $39.99.

Every Monday Android Police publishes a list of new and notable apps or games to the site. It works out to around a hundred new apps a month, and over a thousand by this time in the year. If you wanted to, you could go back and look through all of them on the roundup page... but you probably don't. And why would you, when we've already done the legwork for you?

Following in no particular order are the Android Police team's picks for our favorite new Android apps of 2015. There are some predictable Google apps in there, but most of them are either really great tools for something that's already available or innovative new takes on their respective implementations.

Every Monday Android Police publishes a list of new and notable apps or games to the site. It works out to around a hundred new apps a month, and over a thousand by this time in the year. If you wanted to, you could go back and look through all of them on the roundup page... but you probably don't. And why would you, when we've already done the legwork for you?

Following in no particular order are the Android Police team's picks for our favorite new Android games of 2015. A lot of these didn't debut on Android, but they came to the platform this year, and they're all currently available on the Play Store.

HTC made a name for itself in the smartphone design game with the One M7 in 2013, and a year later in 2014, the One M8 kept on bringing in the accolades - an evolved aesthetic showed more maturity (and slippery-ness), a bit less plastic, and a greater level of overall fit and finish than its predecessor. Still, while the M8 was certainly a pretty phone, you can't deny the One look is aging a bit, and there were high expectations for the phone's successor in the design department. Those hopes didn't exactly pan out here at MWC, as you're by now well aware.

This year at MWC, there's little in the way of room for the notion that Samsung failed to deliver on the hype. The Galaxy S6 is the most dramatic redesign the Galaxy S has ever seen, and is more Samsung than ever before. Down to the NAND storage and Exynos chipset, the S6 takes Samsung's larger corporate vision of vertical integration seriously, and that should have Samsung's competitors on edge (no pun intended).

To start, the physical hardware simply seems superb. Even the relatively early units we played with had outstanding fit and finish, and I don't mean that in the forgiving sense we typically are forced to provide Android handsets because of the median build quality in the industry.

The Grand S3 isn't a beefed up version of the Galaxy S III, an easy mistake to make just from skimming the name alone. No, it's the latest version of ZTE's flagship handset. This time around, the company is using more than competitive pricing to draw attention to its kind-of-premium device. Anyone who buys this phone in the future will apparently be able to unlock it using their eyes.

ZTE has partnered with EyeVerify to incorporate its Eyeprint ID solution with an upcoming version of the Grand S3, a phone that's already on sale in China. It is one of the first smartphones to implement this technology, which allows users to scan their retinas using a phone's front-facing camera.

At Mobile World Congress SanDisk announced a microSD card coming with a massive 200GBs of space. That's for consumers to buy. But there's something for manufacturers too. The company has also announced improved iNAND storage to pack inside mobile devices.

As always, the new iNAND 7132 storage solution is SanDisk's most advanced yet. The company's latest embedded flash drive offers faster transfer speeds, enabling improved performance for burst photography and 4k video capture. It also provides quicker wireless connectivity thanks to support for 802.11ac and 802.11ad.

SanDisk boasts transfer speeds of over 1Gb/s and sequential read/write speeds of 125/280MB/s. The 7132 can handle more burst shots in a short period of time and allows for up to 3 frames per second of RAW image capture.

Lenovo has used this year's Mobile World Congress as a chance to unveil two new affordable Android tablets that expand upon the immensely cheap TAB 2 A series introduced in January. These slates don't aim for a lower price point ($99 is hard to beat, after all). Instead, both come with LTE.

Left: TAB 2 A10-70, Right: TAB 2 A8

The TAB 2 A10-70 (not to be confused with the A7-10) has a 10 inch FHD screen, is only 8.9 millimeters thin, and weighs around 500 grams. It will run Android 4.4 (Lollipop expected in June) powered by a MediaTek 1.5 GHz quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 7,000mAh battery.

If you were busy yesterday morning, or too hung over from Saturday night, you may have missed Samsung's Unpacked presentation from Barcelona, Spain. Sure, you could read about the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge and their upcoming availability in the US, the revised Gear VR, and Samsung Pay... Or you could blow 40-some minutes watching the show in all its glossy grandeur. Did you really have anything better to do at work, today?

Ok, seriously, when you're done watching the show, check out those articles. We really do have a lot of information Samsung didn't cover during the event.